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For our six week project, we will analyze how exchange through free boxes and the “For Sale or Free!” Facebook page at Bryn Mawr College as well as the clothing and appearances of Bryn Mawr students play into direct and indirect contacts within Bryn Mawr and beyond. This project will be largely separated between us but we will relate the two parts through the flow of clothing in and out of Bryn Mawr and the contacts that result.
DISCLAIMER:
I am in no way a professional poet, nor is this an incredible polished poem (by any stretch of the imagination). There is no doubt a lot that could be made more clear or logical. It is very much an edited train of thought, either about myself or about situations I’ve seen other people in. It is a processing of emotion and a reflection of the stigma we subconsciously internalize in every day life.
“SOMETIMES”
Sometimes, the right
words are the wrong ones for
the right reasons
but the wrong people
say them
no one tells them off
it’s hard to see the
discrepancy of the story
“I’M NOT A RACIST”
You can shout it
I am having a little difficulty choosing a topic to delve into for this upcoming project on the contact zone, but I think I'd like to get a closer look at museums in the area. I think a museum functions as a contact zone in many instances. Over the summer, I went to the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts for a day. On exhibit were some Inuit artifacts, most of which had ceremonial purposes. I wondered if the act of displaying such sacred objects had an adverse effect on the culture it was taken from, and if their exhibition could impair the cultural importance of the objects. I think I could turn this project into an examination of objectification, ownership, and respect in the museum setting.
Cheryl Strayed decided to go hiking on the Pacific Crest Trail from Mojave, Los Angeles to Portland and the backpack she would carry is her only property on the way. The backpack appears throughout the whole book can seems really important. At the same time, readers can see how she changed the weight of her backpack on her way. The things in backpack are just like the things that she carried on her mind, tormenting her at first; when she took something out of the backpack and throw them away, it is like she threw the painful thoughts out of her mind.
As a dancer, you are constantly walking that ever so slight line between the paradoxical gesture of making yourself at once as small and as big as possible. Our bodies are both our instruments, vessels that we bend and tone and stretch and compress to convey our deepest expressions of human emotion, and our greatest tragedy. The body will never achieve what it sets out to do; you can always bend further, tone more, stretch farther and compress smaller. You can always do more. And because you are always reaching for the unattainable, the dialogue we strive to achieve becomes lost in the inaccessible in-human.
Strayed
Elena Luedy
Professor Cohen
E-Sem
10/8/15
Wild About Wild
Wild, a riveting memoir by Cheryl Strayed, talks about her experiences hiking the Pacific Crest Trail and what lead her to start the difficult journey. Throughout the story, Strayed uses juxtaposition to tell her story, alternating between her life before and during the PCT. While reading the book, the audience comes to realize that the story is not so much about the wilderness of the trail itself, but Strayed’s internal wild.
From The Veil to The Earbud:
Limits of Black Representation in Music
Voice is a quality of humans distinct to each. It is that set of experiences and moments that shape one’s particular perspectives on life in a way that is all consuming, allowing the tastes of one to bleed through words and express one’s essence. This concept of voice allows for a give and take of shaping experiences. One can accumulate new ideas and reshape their essence at any given time. Theater works as a mechanism within which one can alter their voice uniquely, as it creates a “third space” by “[establishing] connections between groups that otherwise might not come into contact and… imagining communities different from those we have at present” (Fraden 23), thus permitting one to examine oneself with new perspectives.
Wild, by Cheryl Strayed, is a novel greatly influenced by the dichotomy between power and fear and the attempt to overcome fear using power. The following passage about her rejection of fear clearly defines Strayed’s struggle between the two forces: